This piece is adapted from one I originally published in August 2007, during the final leg of my 30-month full-time road odyssey. I reprint it now, during this Solstice/Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanza season, as a reminder of the play of shadow and light in our lives.
The shadows will tell me the story and I will write what I see.
~ The MoonQuest: A True Fantasy
There's a scene in my novel,
The MoonQuest
, where one of the characters, horrified by the tyranny that has overtaken neighboring lands, describes the land itself as inherently malevolent.
"I will never set foot in that place again. It is evil. The land itself is evil," Fara says to Toshar, the book's main character.
I thought of that scene while driving through
Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas a few years back.
So called because it follows a dramatic bend in the Rio Grande River, the park is a vast and remote desertscape of mountains, plains and river oases -- awe-inspiring in its natural beauty.
Is beauty, however, wasn't what prompted the realization that struck me so forcefully back then.
Beauty often suggests light. The catalyst for my
Aha! was anything but.
As I drove east along the park's flatlands that day, an ominous complex of craggy cliffs captured my attention. Rising menacingly to the south and scraping the storm clouds that hung low in an unfriendly sky, these mountains felt, as my daughter would have put it back then, "creepy."
The scene felt dark, forbidding, inhospitable. And although a road offered access, I felt reluctant to follow it.
Yet, even as I drove past the turnoff, an inner voice urged me to reconsider.
Reluctantly, I turned around and headed south. After a short straightaway, a series of hairpin turns carried me up and up and then, surprisingly, down — into a basin-like valley ringed with mountains.
If my passage along the road into the Chisos Basin was dark, gloomy and threatening, the basin itself was bright, sunlit and welcoming. The sky, far from stormy, was largely clear. From this perspective, the mountains were gentle, embracing and enfolding.
Far removed from the prison I expected, this was a sanctuary, its soaring walls cathedral-like.
I stepped from the car and all the heaviness lifted so rapidly, it was as though it had never existed.
Later, as I drove out -- back into the still-overcast "outside world" -- I remembered Toshar's response to Fara:
"The land mourns, Fara, for all the blood that soaks into it. The land weeps, for all the hatred that desecrates it. The land rages, for all the malignance that grinds into it. But the land is not evil, Fara. M'nor smiled on Q'ntana once. She will again."
And as I remembered that, I realized that this land -- as menacing as it still appeared -- was not evil, was not possessed by the dark forces I first ascribed to it.
Rather, the land was a metaphor for my own dark forces, my own fears.
When I drove into the darkness of the
Chisos Mountains, I was driving into the darkness in my own heart. And when I reached its light-filled center, the heart of this mountain cluster, I had actually reached the center of my own heart, itself always filled with light.
You see, there is no darkness outside of me -- not in the land, not in another. All the darkness in the land and all the darkness in the world exists within me or it could not reflect itself back at me through outer means.
The call to drive up the mountain was not to confront and transform some shadowy Dark Lord of the Rocks. It was a call to enter into my own shadowy self, into the fears that, as they do for Toshar, still tug at me "with tiny crab claws."
Only by acknowledging my own shadow can I reconnect with the light that always lies at its center. Only by entering into the heart of my darkness can I be embraced by the eternal flame of my own divinity.
Does that mean there is no darkness in the world? Of course not. But that darkness cannot exist independent of the darkness we each carry within us.
It's easy to demonize those who rape, torture and kill, those who abuse the Earth, those who disparage, disrespect and disempower. Too easy.
What's hard is to remember that
nothing can exist outside us that doesn't live within.
What's hard to remember is that only by acknowledging those inner demons, only by walking through our fears, only by driving into the heart of our darkness, can we touch the light that always resides at the center -- of each of us.
• What shadowy parts of yourself can you acknowledge and own today?
• Who (or what) can you stop demonizing today, seeing them instead as reflections of the darkness you carry?
• How can you free those inner demons onto the pages of your writing in a way that strips them of their power over you and, instead, empowers your work?
Photos by Mark David Gerson: Chisos Mountains, Big Bend National Park
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